The Bristol Role-Play Corpus

Overview

This Corpus
comprises the sound-files and transcriptions of a collection of
3-minute dialogues by native and non-native speakers. Each pair of
students role-plays a scenario in which they must argue the case
for working for money versus voluntary work during the summer
holidays. The resulting dialogues allow for comparisons to be made
between native and non-native spontaneous speech. The Corpus is a
monitor corpus which is added to each year and currently
comprises:

The dialogues can also be compared with
similar dialogues recorded for the SWELCC Corpus of Chinese
Learners of English.

Works which draw on the Corpus include:

Zheng, Qun 2012 A Sociopragmatic Study of
Discourse Markers in Spoken British and Chinese

English. Unpublished PhD Thesis, UWE,
Bristol.

Beeching, Kate forthc. “Variability in the
non-native use of pragmatic markers: the example of
well in role-play data.” In Kate Beeching and Helen
Woodfield (eds.) Researching Sociopragmatic Variability.
Perspectives from Variational and Interlanguage Pragmatics.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.